Bid from PST made!

I would suspect that most have now seen, if not heard, that The PST have tabled their bid to buy Portsmouth Football Club.

Such a bid was, apparently, unlikely to come before the creditors meeting on Monday but today this has come!

The following statement was issued on The Trust website today...

POMPEY SUPPORTERS' TRUST BID FOR PORTSMOUTH FOOTBALL CLUB

Today (Friday 22nd June 2012) the Pompey Supporters Trust have submitted a bid to purchase Portsmouth Football Club to PKF, the administrators of PFC.

Rosemary Penn-Newman, partner in BTG Corporate Finance part of the Begbies Traynor Group commented "We have today submitted a bid on behalf of the Pompey Supporters Trust for the acquisition of Portsmouth Football Club. The Trust has been working on putting this bid together for some time but we feel that we now have an offer that deserves serious consideration. We are unable to disclose the contents of the bid which has been submitted to Trevor Birch, one of the administrators. There is a creditors meeting scheduled for Monday 25th June when any bids for the Club will be reviewed. Whichever bidder ends up in the driving seat there will still be lot of work to do to ensure a successful completion, the most important of which is continuing the on-going negotiations with the creditors."

Ashley Brown, Chair of the PST and leader of the bid team, said "In recent years the community as a whole has become disenfranchised from Portsmouth FC. Huge amounts of money came into the football club and disappeared into the pockets of a few, whilst local businesses remained unpaid. Whilst today's proposal from the PST cannot right all those wrongs, we do believe we offer the best future for the club and community. If we are given the opportunity by the creditors to take over PFC we aim to bring an end to the severe financial mismanagement of recent years and ensure it never happens again."

The PST Board would like to thank the teams at Verisona, Begbies Traynor and Taylor Cocks who have helped us over the past few months and also the many, many Pompey Fans that have kept the faith and pledged so far. Submitting a bid is the first step - and in important one in itself. We now want the bid to succeed and become a milestone not just for Pompey, but for fan and community involvement in football clubs.

So, what do we think guys could this really be the time when us fans really do get our club back?

last thing I want is bunch of pompey fans running the club on a breakeven basis, investing in infrastructure and the long term future of the club. An area of 400k people with only one club in it, the ninth biggest in the country , how do they expect to make a good go of it! Clearly smacks of naivity and unprofessionalism. Id much rather a foreign owner who has put us in admin twice, 'robbed' the taxman and local businesses, hiked up season tickets and sold off players to take money out of the club. That will be a lot better for the future stability and growth of the club, right penton?!

Penton, I think we can make it work and want to try, I am not convinced it will be easy but with a bit of hard work commitment and solidarity it could be the best thing that ever happened to the club. Whats your alternative?

I have not kept my finger on the pulse so I don't really know how the PST bid would deal with the huge debts, money claimed by Chanrai, in fact the whole infrastructure. If both bids were, 'goers', and equally sound I would obviously want the PST to succeed BUT all I want is a sound, well managed, stabily financed Pompey. Whichever one delivers that is my choice.

if the PST wins then running the club and breaking even and having a future won't be easy, of course it won't and it may not even work, but at least they would have given it a try. But it has to be a better option than more of the same old same old which is no more likely to deliver stability and a future to the club. Will the PST bid win? Probably unlikely given Portpin's financial hold over PFC . . but here's hoping.

I'm the same as russelm... I can't pledge/invest any money until I see a clear plan. I'm assuming a plan is in place now which would have been submitted to the administrator. My opinion is that I'm nervous about all the bids - pompey have been in the crapper for a while now and like the property market is going to take a good decade to get back to normal (and that's if everything goes to plan). What's the best bid? I don't know. But as already stated, how will the PST consortium be able to deal with running costs and plan purchases/pay wages etc?